October 28th, 2016

October 28th, 2016

Preparing for the World Premiere of a new immersive composition

I've been sort of drifting in my hotel all day in Leuven, doing a bit of work, drinking "intense" sparkling water, and finally getting down to reading Lawrence Weschler's seeing is forgetting the name of the thing that one sees about Robert Irwin. This book was recommended to me by several different people over the course of about a week last year and It's a pleasure to delve in to the personality behind such monumentally beautiful works of minimal, perceptual art.

This work is taking my ongoing work with the Apparitions chord to new and interesting places that bring together some of my early glacial rhythmic concepts with an improvisational scheme that makes this the first piece I've written in quite some time to have anything like a traditional score. This work is a direct response to having experienced La Monte Young's The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Step-down Transformer from The Four Dreams of China last summer at Dia, around the same time that so many people suggested this Irwin book to me. You can read the full program notes here.

We're positioning the ensemble as well as the video projections on two sides of the audience, while the deceptively simple three-note drone is placed directly in the center, creating a situation where the entirety of the audio-visual environment envelops the listener and the performer equally, bringing both into the same plane of experience.

This is an exciting new piece for me and it's been an incredibly rewarding process working with both Transit and ChampdAction to bring this work to life. I'm hoping to develop more situations like this to explore new facets of this work.

If you happen to be in Belgium, do come to the Transit Festival, there are loads of wonderful concerts planned.